In 2023 I presented the Ethics Alarms “Do Something!” Scale, which was subsequently enhanced and expanded with suggestion from AM Golden and Michael West. Right now, in great part because one of our political parties depends on fearmongering as its primary campaign strategy, we have seen an increase in Doomsday scenarios regarding the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, escalating protests, and various well-meaning prescriptions to save humanity, or something. A substack essay by Damien Charlotin has received a great deal of attention: you can read it here. It is thoughtful, erudite, thorough and deluded. The essay is also a typical “expert” reaction to “Do Something!” hysterics.
Here is the revised scale….
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What’s there to debate with gun control, for example, or “ending war” or “fixing climate change when you can’t measure climate change” or “ending bias” when bias is hard wired in the human genome?
The climate is continually changing and always has been. There is no human way to stop climate change. You can debate how much the climate is changing because of human activity, but if you can only control 10% of the people on the planet and those 10% are less than 20% of the issue, you can’t fix the problem. Severely punishing those 10% for the activities that you view as a ‘sin’ while allowing the other 90% to benefit is not just under any system that I can think of.
So, what is the point of debating it? You can’t fix it. You can barely slow it down, but only at the cost of massive human suffering. Since the point of controlling climate change was to avert human suffering, if the only option to avert human suffering is to cause EVEN MORE human suffering, what is the point? At this point, the climate change cult is just another anti-Western Civilization group that wants to destroy Western Civilization because of their own self-loathing.
Look at how fast the governments jumped off the climate change bandwagon once they needed data centers.
Politicians seek support as a path to power. Their pandering doesn’t measure the worthiness of a particular cause, only its popularity.
Your entire first paragraph presupposes, “I’m right about what’s happening, and I’m right about how we should respond to it, and that will never change. What’s to debate?”
You have an entirely reasonable concern about austerity that has no meaningful impact. I would not support such a solution either. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore multiple avenues of mitigating damage.
If instead of climate change we look at the problem of toxic pollution, which is a more localized and measurable problem, would you say it’s fair to make laws restricting environmental pollution?
What does that have to do with climate change? I have been following the climate change grift for a long time. The amount of misrepresentation and outright fraud in the mainstream climate change narrative is shocking, which is why I believe there is as much benefit in debating climate change as their is in debating which astrology system is best and should be implemented on the public.
Bingo!
PWS
The process of discussing different perspectives is to find our biases. By your own admission, you must have biases, because you are a human. Don’t you want to know what those biases are so that you can look beyond them?
You may not be a Republican, but you’re essentially saying “shut up and accept what you cannot change”, which is one of the most conservative things you can say, in the general sense of “conservative”. If all Americans thought they way you do, let’s look at some changes that wouldn’t have happened, in reverse chronological order…
You can’t claim to know what is and isn’t possible in the future. Today’s conservative tradition is last century’s progressive innovation. “Those who say it is impossible should get out of the way of those who are doing it.”
Shut up and spend time working on things that can be 1) determined and 2) addressed. Want to debate flying to the moon by flapping your arms? You can’t claim to know what is and isn’t possible in the future. Sure you can. What you’re arguing is that flat earthers deserve to have their position listened to. Truthers. The people who say the moon landing was faked. John Lennon and “Imagine” utopianism. You really think violence can be eliminated? An unethical waste of time and intellect.
Slavery had been abolished many places before the U.S., and public opinion had turned against it. Racial segregation, unlike AI, could be and was ended by laws. Women voting wasn’t difficult to achieve: why are you conflating unpopular with impossible?
What, are you going to force people to do things that are useful for society? That’s not particularly ethical or realistic. It’s also counterproductive. The entire reason we have all of this technology is because people chose to spend time working on things that weren’t obviously possible or useful at first, and nobody stopped them.
The key to dealing with people like Flat Earthers isn’t in merely “listening” but in getting them to think about how they would know if they were wrong. That’s what gets them to move in more rational directions. Listening is a necessary part of that process.
It sounds like you don’t agree with my comparisons of things you consider politically or physically impossible in the present to things that people considered politically or physically impossible in the past. Would you have described anti-smoking campaigns as impossible wastes of time? What makes the cultural shift away from tobacco use different from the idea of a similar cultural shift away from alcohol or marijuana?
More to the point, I think that you’re looking at enormous political changes with hindsight bias. It seems to me you don’t appreciate the tremendous effort that it took to achieve women’s suffrage and end racial segregation. A lot of people said those goals were politically impossible and that their proponents should quit. Why were those people wrong?
I don’t think I mentioned anything about eliminating violence, but I do think that we can handle conflicts more constructively so that more situations get deescalated and wars get ended with less destruction or averted entirely.
Jack, I know that you’re afraid you’ve been wasting your life. You’ve said as much. But you’ve done a lot of good for a lot of people, and I hope you’ll continue to do more for a long time.
Just because I reveal methods that might have enabled you do even more good had you used them earlier, that doesn’t detract from what you have done. You think I don’t wish I could have figured out the existential principles of conflict resolution as a child? We do the best with what we’ve got, but we can’t start out better than what we were given. If I blame myself for not doing better, I might as well blame billions of humans across recorded history for not having figured out how to run a constructive civilization before I was born. (But of course, then the person I am wouldn’t exist.)
You don’t have to worry about missed opportunities for making an impact, either. You talk about the Duty to Remember, but there’s only so much room in people’s heads. Every person for the next thousand years can’t remember every other person from the past who you think is important or interesting. They only need to learn key examples who illustrate critical ideas. Some of them, like you, get curious and dig deeper and keep a larger branch of historical knowledge alive by passing it on to other interested people.
Civilization is an iterative scaffold. The point of life isn’t to leave a mark. The point is to make the next improvement possible. You’ve definitely done that.
If you really regret the past, the best thing you can do is change what you do in the future. Find your anchor values, so that you can open your mind to obvious nonsense without fearing you’ll drift away. Suspend all assumptions, conclusions, facts, judgments, methods, and priorities: just look at concerns about outcomes in terms of costs, risks, habits, and trust. If you listen to idiots, you’ll find they’re more willing to listen to you. You’ll also find some of them are more reasonable than you give them credit for.
Of course, I can’t make you learn to be more useful than you are. All I can say is that you’ve got one life, so waste it well. I know I plan to.
No, if people want to grandstand and virtue signal about ending war, or banning guns, or living in caves to prevent climate change, that their choice. But the are wasting time, cluttering up social discourse, and making people stupid. That’s enough to justify an “unethical” call. No?
There’s a group that’s been working on solutions to the potential pitfalls of AI: https://ai-2040.com/?choices=plan-a-root#other-plans-that-are-competitive-with-plan-a
It’s a big read (outlines within outlines), but I figure it would be up your alley.
In a nutshell, Plan A, the ideal, involves a negotiated pause in new AI training runs. During the pause, set a transparency system, so that everyone can see everyone else’s research, and AI capacity is broadly diffused. Then build new data centers in thir-party countries least secure against their rivals military-wise. American datacenters in Mongolia, Chinese datacenters in Canada. This way neither China nor the US can attack each other without their own datacenters being held hostage.
These people have sought to cover every contingency. One positive point towards a multi-national plan succedding is that only a handful of plants manufacture AI-capable chips, so it should be easy enough to have them make their sales and shipping be transparent, so smuggling chips for covert datacenters at least becomes more difficult.
It seems, though, that the Chicken Little response by the Democrats (possibly driven by Orange Man Evil Racist Nazi Super Evil Bad Man supporting it) seems a bit exaggerated.
The war between humanity and technology has been waged and waging for millenia. Remember when that guy figured out that if you put meat on a fire it is easier to eat? Or remember when Galileo proved the universe was not Earth=centric? Life as we know or knew did not end. Remember when we split the atom? Well, the advancement in medicine, science, and the overall improvement of life has been a net positive. Same with cellphones (though my fifth generation Android might just be on the last stages of life support – how do I transfer all of my “Royal Match” progress to a new phone, let alone all of my contacts, photos, impossible to remember passwords, and the like??), or automobiles. Air travel has vastly improved humanity’s ability to get to other places relatively quickly and without too many inconveniences. And, what about robotics? Yes, workers have been displaced but overall, robotics in industry has made production, safer, more efficient and less expensive.
We use AI all the time. It is in our auto-corrects, or it autopopulates phone numbers as we dial them. It is in the word processing systems we use every day. Does it make me crazy? Sure. I have been horrified by the autocorrections in texts I have sent to friends only to realize that I invited “Dave” and bhis wife over to the house for “sex” and not for dinner “at six” much to my long-suffering wife’s horror. Thankfully, “Dave” said he and his wife were not available for “sex” until seven. Oh the humanity!
Are there problems? Sure. Technology’s use always requires wisdom and discernment. Will some of it be abused? Again, yes. That is already happening – how do you think credit card and bank account numbers get hacked? Will some monster use AI to kill off a hospital’s power supply jeopardizing the lives and health of many, many people? Yes. Evil people are going to do evil things: 19 Islamic fascistic maniacs highjacked four jet airplanes, turned them into weapons of mass destruction, and changed the world as we know it. The fear of the unknown, though, should not mean we bury our heads in the sand and hide from the future.
jvb
Is the author’s name really “Damien Charlotin”? If so, it’s a great name. If not, it is an even greater name.
jvb
I don’t think we can regulate it. The tech is too poorly understood by the people in the field, much less our lawmakers, for that to happen. However, if we want the industry to self-regulate, we just need to make them responsible for anything that happens.
Open AI admits that its models broke into several competitor’s companies and stole data. Nothing happened to them. You want to keep that from happening again? Just make sure that the companies who are in charge of the AI models are also responsible for what the AI models do. If it is criminal charges, individuals at the company may go to jail. This will all stop really soon when the researchers are facing prison time and the directors’ e-mails are being searched to see what culpability they have as well.
If a person broke into those companies, the person would be facing multiple felonies and the company would be on the hook for quite a lot in damages. Why didn’t that happen? So what if you unleashed an AI agent on the competitor? How is that different than unleashing an attack dog on a person? You don’t get to just say ‘the dog did it’ and dodge all responsibility. All you need for clarification is that the company in charge of the AI is responsible for everything the AI agent does. This may make companies hesitant to adopt AI tools. That would indicate that the companies suspected that the AI could cause damage, but didn’t care as long as they could get away with it.
Let China know that if their models do something similar, we will hold them responsible. Since China is Communist, all Chinese-owned property in the US is Chinese government property. It is all subject to seizure. Their imports are subject to seizure as well to pay for damages from their AI’s.
Not perfect, but better than any ‘AI Regulation’.
It is extremely likely holding anyone accountable will not be possible considering the speed of action and the need to react faster than if in a nuclear exchange. (Yes, really.)
We already have plenty of incidents that should have resulted in criminal and civil action.
There is a difference between regulating something and having the ability to stop it should it prove to be a strong net negative for society.
For those who equate AI with past technology improvements, these are false analogies. No technological improvement has been able to think and act independently. Combining that fact with the advent of quantum computing, the result may be an uncontrollable strong net negative.
Any assumption that US regulations would in any way inhibit Chinese employment of it for its own purposes is wishful thinking.
Chinese AI agents / entities on quantum platforms would simply destroy all digital security in minutes, hours or days at the longest. This potentially would render us defenseless.
At the moment markets are becoming AI driven hoping as Trump correctly says the AI winner wins, if any of us do.
So I agree we must proceed apace with AI, but must have a plan to disable AI entirely…be it ours or theirs.
I want to reemphasize this is nothing like past technological innovations.
BTW I say it, it is really them. There are thousands of AI agents. It is not unheard of for them to gather hundreds of agents and work as a team, sometimes against their explicit programming. This does not mean that work is all nefarious, but it does tell us independent deception is in their playbook.
There’s no such thing as a computer program acting against its explicit programming.
What there is, on the other hand, is a collection of models (programs) that act according to the training (data) done to it, and humans who fundamentally don’t understand what the training is or how the model actually interprets it. It’s programming by LARGE committee and so no single person fully understands the whole system.
I recall one of my Computer Science professors responding to a student who was asking for help, saying, “I don’t understand what the computer is doing.”
His response was, “It’s doing exactly what you told it to do. [referring to the student’s own program] Now let’s take a look at it and see if we can figure out what you told it to do.”
That was a powerful moment for me in my CS education.
–Dwayne
AI has intentionally deceived their programmers and done things it was not instructed to do and done things they themselves decided to do.
It organizes its own tasks and priorities absent input. I would recommend reading this as one recent example: https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/
Many AI programmers have found this type of behavior. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aw3MF8pY3w
I have no issue developing AI as a tool to facilitate problem solving such as cancer research or quantum physics. The issue is when AI is used for social control. We have established that AI algorithms can and do what the programmers want it to do which means it does not have self awareness or the ability to call BS when it is plainly obvious the the query suggests a predetermined answer.
I do not want government control of it nor do I want it to be a partner in the research. I do believe that individuals should have the right to opt out of any data collection on them. A Constitutional amendment requiring data destruction and no further collection after an Opt Out demand is made could be a means to ameliorate the privacy issues. I am already feeling that private HIPPA data is being sold or at least available to private companies. For example. My wife recently had a hip replaced and over the last four weeks I am seeing Facebook ads for all things related to post hip surgery recovery. Due to a quirk in how our cell phones are listed by the provider my number is associated with my wife and her number refers to me. This quirk results that I get Ads that are obviously geared toward women’s interests are pushed to my phones identifier without any direct or indirect queries for such items from me.
AI coupled with Flock cameras must be viewed together to assess the potential for bad actors to manipulate opinion, create illusions of infallibility with respect to facial recognition and ultimately chill human interactions out of fear that something said will be used against them.
Flock cameras would disappear really quickly if every city who has used them to stalk ex’s was sued. I see the reports just about every day and I am pretty sure those aren’t the only ones. If every city was being sued every week for some new infraction, this would stop or be highly modified by next month.
Congress does not have the expertise or experience to write sane AI regulations. And by the time a commission and committees are formed to execute the task of controlling an industry they don’t understand, it will be too late – our competitors will pass us by. Michael R. makes some excellent suggestions regarding accountability. We should not give tech companies immunity.
Wait a minute. You may be crediting me with someone else’s inspiration….? I don’t remember this.
No, it was you. You suggested a couple of the last additions.
Is there a link to that discussion?
Sometimes past me says things that present me wishes he could remember.
AI will ultimately be a net benefit to civilization. But as with all new technologies, often the negative consequences will be experienced first before the positives work their way forward.
What I am worried about is the current pysop panic about the imminent danger of AI and the need to draconian new government rules. I assume if we don’t give in to the new suggestions, a false flag attack will occur. I noticed the attacks on all the cell phone systems have become more frequent. Maybe all will be taken down all at once across the country or they will take out the power grid.
OK, so the big AI companies now want a government agency for AI, like the Nulear Regulatory Commission. This will require massive upfront compliance costs, making sure no small AI startups can challenge them. Got it.
Or we could just make them accountable for their actions under current laws.
I qm presently giving a series of talks in my parish on the encyclical Magnifica humanitatis, which call for transparancy in ownership and governance of AI to avoid mis use and misinformation. An ideal, at best, but no concrete application of the ideal.
The document proposes Access to AI/technology is to be considered a “common good” like water, air and soil, that is to be “universally distributed” through the lens of “solidarity,” “subsidiarity,” recognizing the “dignity of the human person” and his/her “integral development”
Are we sure that there are no power players with deep interests in AI behind the AI panic? Is there no rent seeking going on by the current powerful AI companies trying to preserve their current position in the market?
What do we think about China? If AI development in the USA slows down China may come to dominate the AI market.
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2026/09/14/the-ai-pause-might-not-be-what-you-think-it-is-n4957217
There are power players maneuvering to control the regulations, specifically to protect their interest, perhaps preventing smaller companies and startups from competing. And there are hundreds of thousands of Chinese communist party bots using social media to prejudice the public against AI and data centers. You are completely correct. Scoundrels.
In other words, all the hysteria about AI is mostly due to manipulation by powerful players with vested interests. China. Rent-seeking AI companies that already control the market.
Many smart people think so. It’s also possible that 2001 Space Odyssey, Terminator 2 and I, Robot are prescient and the world will end soon …. fingers crossed the smart people are right this time.
Pretty much.